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Education a Vital Necessity

Finally, there is a profound responsibility resting upon the whole
people, and if it is not fulfilled the other measures of safety will be of little
permanent influence. That responsibility is educational. With a rigid immigration
law and suppression of murderous propaganda, we shall have done about all the
strictly protective work that is feasible, but there is a vast area of positive
preventive work for the future. So long as demagogues and the sensational press
are left to do the educating on economic and social problems, they will continue,
in spite of a possible temporary reaction against them now, to determine the
character of public sentiment on these matters. We have only begun the task
of rational education of public opinion. Serious instruction in elementary economic
principles, and the facts of industrial history and present conditions, has
been almost wholly wanting outside the college class-rooms, and even there the
teaching has been so theoretical and abstract as to give little real understanding
of our institutions or idea of sound statesmanship or the duties of citizenship.
To-day the field is ripe for popular education along these lines in a way never
before [309][310] attempted, and the demand for
it is coming from all quarters. It requires systematic, organized effort, and
the instruments must not be simply the colleges.
Economic and sociological education, based on
scientific principles and verified, intelligible data, must extend through the
high schools and some time even into the public schools, and it must further
be spread through the press, through special literature, and through local organizations
and lecture courses organized for this special purpose. The long neglect of
this field renders action on a large scale all the more imperative now. It may
seem formidable, but there is no quicker or easier way to guarantee safety to
our institutions and no other that can have permanently reliable results. The
means of popular enlightenment are at hand, and therefore, in the last analysis,
the responsibility for social security in the future lies with the community.
It lies especially with the wealthy, who not only have most at stake in the
maintenance of orderly progress, security and social peace, but are best able
to provide for a widespread educational movement of this character. If the tragic
death of the president shall rouse the nation to the necessity of this great
work, the deplorable sacrifice will not have been wholly in vain.